


Take Five

by northwest_southwest_central



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Board Games, Character Study, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, First Impressions, Gen, Trust Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:14:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25680403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northwest_southwest_central/pseuds/northwest_southwest_central
Summary: A high-quality board game piece made of precious stone. It probably belongs to someone with a tactical mind.Claude knows that distrust is part of the game, but maybe it doesn't have to be.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41





	Take Five

**Author's Note:**

> this was literally supposed to be a drabble I don't know how it turned into 4k words

Try as he might, the king cannot help but laugh as he bears off his final stone, stacking it atop the others with a resounding clack.

“ _How_!?” whines the young prince, with the thoughtless indignance of any child. “You _always_ know what I’m going to _do_!”

“You are still predictable!” the king exclaims. “But you get better with every single game. I was twenty-two before I beat my father! I need to beat you while I still can!”

The prince grins wildly, as accomplished and arrogant as a loser can be. The king matches his son’s joy as he clears the board, collecting the stones and setting them up anew.

“What would the courtiers say if they knew their king was being outwitted by a child, eh?”

“They’d be _proud_!” the prince declares, and the king laughs again, hearty and honored as he is.

***

The Kingdom students speak in load-bearing accents, with short vowels and terse consonants. The Empire students speak slow and regal, like they’re insisting that their time is more important than yours. Only the Alliance students sound anything close to familiar, and even then, it’s a stretch.

The boy now known as Claude unpacks his meager belongings, muttering a few meaningless words to himself in his mother’s accent, fixing their inflections like he’s fixing his collar in the mirror. At the bottom of his bag, his fingers brush against the smooth surface of his board, and he dimly wonders why he even packed it.

Dumb. Sentimental. No one here even knows how to play. Claude sets the board up anyway, leaving it atop his dresser to collect dust, if nothing else. They play a different game in Fódlan, one with misleading piece names and confusing movement, a game that relies more on memorization than actual strategy. Learning it takes him less than an hour. The next few days will be full of greetings and pleasantries, and he’s preparing himself to retain as much information as he can.

Lysithea snaps at him that she doesn’t have time for games. Leonie endures a few defeats and simply concedes that she’s no good. Ignatz is keen and analytical, but he always picks the _optimal_ moves and doesn’t realize how easy that is to manipulate. They’re a good bunch, all of them. When Claude experiences his first loss, Raphael even consoles him, cheerfully telling him he’s been playing against his grandpa since he was a kid. The big guy is friendly to a fault and Claude isn’t fond of the way he downplays his skill, but that’s something they can work on over time.

The last one he finds is Marianne, because the poor girl looks like she’s going to have a heart attack if he so much as gets near her. He finds her being talked at by Hilda, and challenges the two of them to a friendly game, emphasis on friendly.

“Nope,” Hilda says for both of them, with no explanation.

Marianne helplessly stares at her feet and allows Hilda to drag her away by the hand. He can’t even pity her. If she was from where he was from, she’d probably already be dead.

These people are going to be the future leaders of the Alliance. The work is practically cut out for him.

***

That teach is an odd one, that’s for certain. She doesn’t smile or laugh or yell or really do anything at all, and Claude is tempted, as he always is, to find out how far he can push before being pushed back. The guided tour of the monastery is his suggestion, and she agrees without incident.

He gestures around the classroom that’s going to be theirs, expecting her to at least examine her desk or something. When she doesn’t, he points to his own desk, where the board he’s set up still lies in wait.

“Hey look, someone left their game in here! And here I thought these classrooms were for all work and no play.” He punctuates the remark with a wink.

No reaction.

Like a fool, he perseveres. “Say, do you know the rules?”

She fixes him with the exact same facial expression she had while killing those bandits. “Yes.”

“Care to play a friendly round sometime?”

“No.”

She’s good on the battlefield, at least. The Golden Deer win the mock battle, and their year moves along at a steady pace all the way until the Goddess’s Rite of Rebirth.

Teach gets her hands on a sword that can cut mountains in half, and suddenly, that blank-eyed stare of hers seems a lot more meaningful.

***

A noble from the Kingdom ingratiates himself into their class. Claude challenges him to a game, and as a boon for his inevitable win, he humbly inquires as to the reason for the transfer.

With a smirk, Sylvain pantomimes grabbing twin handfuls of his own chest. “You want a reason? I can give you two.”

Claude grins outwardly, while inwardly losing respect for Sylvain as a man and even more respect for him as a thinker. Trying to seduce one’s instructor is idiotic, and trying to seduce the daughter of the captain of the knights is _twice_ as idiotic, which naturally means that Sylvain must strive to do both those things at once. However, the politics of northern Faerghus are a topic on which Claude is, admittedly, woefully undereducated. The dream of one nation includes _all_ nations—and since he’s never been to Sreng, never met anybody from Sreng, and never met anybody who’s ever been to Sreng, getting cozy with the Gautier heir will have to do for now.

Appearances can deceive. Certainly, other people regard Claude in the same way. Sylvain is smarter than he acts, and more importantly, he’s usually willing to spare Claude a game or two. If faithlessness can be considered a game of strategy, Sylvain has more practice than any of them, and it shows in his playstyle—his short-term power plays are almost enough to compensate for his lack of long-term planning. Almost. Their banter is the most valuable part—Claude needs to brush up on the nuances of the language more than he needs to practice his openings. For every snarky line Claude shoots at him, Sylvain escalates with one of his own, and Claude vaguely entertains the notion that maybe flirting with his northern neighbors is how Sylvain plans to get them to stay away from him, and by extension, his territory.

Or maybe not.

A couple of well-worded questions to childhood friends are enough to uncover his secrets, and it turns out that Sylvain’s got enough baggage to fill a fleet of cargo ships. Claude stores the information away, not expecting it to become relevant so soon.

The Lance of Ruin is taken from Miklan’s body as it lies there, still warm and deceptively human. Claude recalls, distantly, that he’s had family try to kill him, too. Cousins or half-brothers, short-sighted and careless, have come after him—but always in the _proper_ way, spitting cutthroat poisons in the shadows. None of them have become possessed by a centuries-old holy weapon, rampaging without finesse, wounded, lashing out at everything in sight.

No, he thinks, that is the kind of story that could only be told in Fódlan.

***

Lorenz warms up to him, somehow. Maybe’s he’s just that charming, or maybe Lorenz has just finally figured they’ll be stuck together for the next eight months. Either way works.

Judith has warned him about Gloucesters, but nothing about their skinny young upstart gives Claude any cause for alarm, except maybe that stupid haircut. His accent is so pompous that it hurts to listen to—a giveaway that he grew up near the Empire—and Lorenz keeps feeding it with poetic prose and poetic metaphors and other poetic devices that quickly make Claude sick of poetry. It’s all he can do to not to beat him too hard in their games. After all, he’s still a beginner. During one of their free days, Leonie returns to the Golden Deer classroom and spies the two of them hunched over the board, closed off to the rest of the world.

“You guys are still playing that game?” she asks derisively.

Leonie left to go train in the morning, and now she’s already back with lunch. So that means...

“Oh,” Claude realizes. “I guess we’ve been playing for a while, huh?”

Lorenz, concentrating on his next move, merely nods his head. Leonie plops down next to him and arranges her plate and her textbook on the desk, pulling a fork from seemingly nowhere to complete the picture. Eating and studying at the same time—of course, Leonie would never be seen doing less than two things at once. The girl is such a hard worker that Claude had immediately guessed there were no handouts in her future, and unsurprisingly, he was right.

“What’s the score?” she asks between mouthfuls.

An obvious grimace comes over Lorenz’s face. “Not everything must be made into a competition, Leonie.”

Claude lowers his eyes. “It’s nine-two.”

“Nine- _three_ ,” Lorenz corrects him immediately. “I won the last one.”

It’s very hard not to let his laughter show. “Sorry, my mistake. It’s _only_ nine-three.”

Lorenz rolls his eyes, as unbecoming of a noble as that is, and slides forward an aggressive rook. Very few pieces remain, but Claude is still content to play it slow. No reason to risk the advantage he has, not after all the hard work he went through to get it.

As if he’s not sitting right there, Lorenz informs Leonie, “Claude merely enjoys introducing pointlessly competitive elements to an otherwise recreational play session.”

“We’re having fun,” Claude insists without looking up from the board. It’s at least half true.

“Perhaps it would humble you to challenge those _above_ your own skill level,” Lorenz continues, and Claude gets a feeling of where this is headed. “If you must flaunt your own supposed skill, then do so to others of a like mind. Surely, nothing could be more ‘fun’ than the accomplishment of overcoming a once-superior opponent.”

Leonie shovels another bite into her mouth. “Yeah, that’s true. If you keep trashing the rest of us, then maybe you should find better people to play with.”

“I’ve played pretty much all the other two houses by now,” Claude says. Forget playing it slow. He moves up his knight, threatening both of Lorenz’s remaining pawns at once. “And you know what? There’s nobody who’s as entertaining of a partner as you, Lorenz. Give yourself a pat on the back.”

He winks to complete the flattery, but Lorenz doesn’t take it. “Not true. There is a one competent player in particular whom I cannot help but notice you have neglected to challenge.”

He can’t resist. “Who?”

“Edelgard.”

Claude splutters into the table, and Leonie starts laughing out loud.

“Oh, that’s rich!” she exclaims. “Yeah, do it, Claude. It’d be hilarious to watch her kick your ass.”

He exaggerates a shudder. “Come on, guys. I may have done some stupid things in my life, but playing against Edelgard...I mean... _Edelgard_? Let’s be reasonable, here.”

“Already, with the excuses,” Lorenz remarks. “What, specifically, is the reason for your reluctance? Surely, it must be more than the mere possibility of losing. Not even your ego could be _that_ fragile.”

Claude snorts as he knocks over Lorenz’s last rook. The game will be over in four more moves. “It’s not losing that I’m worried about. If I win, Hubert’s probably going to poison me.”

“I fail to consider that a downside,” Lorenz says, with a smugness that Claude can actually admire for a second. “If I am able to endure the indignity of a nine-three deficit, weathering your juvenile chatter and unsportsmanlike scheming as I do, then _surely_ you’re capable of a single game with Edelgard.”

“ _Ten_ -three deficit,” Claude corrects him, gesturing to the board, then sticks out his hand. “Good game. Play again?”

“I think not. We have been playing for quite a while.” Lorenz shakes his hand, then stretches out his shoulders, genuinely, and Claude can’t really find it in himself to be annoyed with the guy anymore.

“Yeah, okay,” he says slowly. “Leonie, you wanna play?”

She shakes her head. “I have homework.” Then, she asks, “Seriously, though, why _don’t_ you play with Edelgard? You’re supposed to be getting along with her anyway, right? Because the rest of us sure as hell aren’t going to do it.”

Claude shrugs. “She’s just really... _intense_. You know what I mean? I’m playing to have fun, and also to improve myself, and I just feel like if I play Edelgard neither of those things are going to happen.”

“...Yeah, Lorenz is right,” she concludes. “Sounds like you’re just being a wimp.”

“It’s a terrible, terrible idea,” Claude says firmly. “Mark my words. I am _not_ going to play against Edelgard.”

***

Gingerly, deliberately, Edelgard pulls the hem of her white glove further down her wrist, then slides one of her rooks across the board.

“Your move, Claude,” she says pleasantly.

He makes no visible reaction, making sure to keep even his eyes motionless. Just sitting across from her would be enough to make anybody crack, even without the pallid retainer looming over her shoulder, orbiting her like an extra shadow, leering at Claude like his mere presence will infect the precious emperor with some kind of repugnant disease. The determination is there to not reveal a single droplet of sweat—at the very least, not before Edelgard does so herself. It doesn’t help that she’s actually pretty good.

“I must admit,” she says, “I was surprised that you asked me to a game. I didn’t know I was worth seeking out specifically.”

That rook is uncomfortably close, so he moves a pawn forward to scare it off. “Is it so wrong of me to try and get to know a fellow student?”

“Claude, I’ll be blunt,” she says, dropping the practiced smile. “Given how you constantly and publicly refer to yourself as a schemer, I can’t help but assume you’ve come to me with some ulterior motive in mind.”

“Maybe your assumption is right. It all depends on how you define ‘ulterior.’ And ‘motive.’ And ‘mind.’” Thoughtfully, he strokes his chin, giving Edelgard a good view of his own obnoxiously white gloves. “Not everything has to be a scheme, princess. Me being the magnanimous guy that I am, I just figured I could help you take the time to kick back and relax.”

Edelgard looks down at the board that Claude has left her, at his gridlock of defenses that would do her more harm than good to attack.

“Kick back,” she repeats. “And you believe this match will help us both to, as you say, ‘kick back?’”

“It’s working for me,” he says cheerfully. Edelgard is still looking at the board, weighing her options, and from behind her, Hubert is still glaring. The straighter Hubert sits up, the more Claude wants to slouch. They’re all together in the Black Eagle classroom, sitting around a desk near the front, the desk that’s probably Edelgard’s—of course it’s hers. Why wouldn’t she sit at the front?

“Your knight is locking down the entire left side,” she observes. “I could take it with my bishop, but then my king would be exposed.”

Now _this_ is interesting. “How confident of you, to discuss your plans right in front of me.”

Edelgard pulls her glove further down, tightening it over her fingers again, and a knowing gleam crops up in her eyes. “I’m sure it’s nothing you haven’t already planned yourself. Yes, I think I’ll do it.”

The knight falls, and Claude quickly snaps up the bishop, and it’s Edelgard’s turn again, and she goes right back to staring and deliberating. No breaks allowed.

“Your retainer looks like he’s dying to say something,” Claude casually remarks. Hubert glares at him in response, and Claude reminds himself to double-check his stash of antitoxins. But if Hubert wants to blend into the background so badly, he can hardly complain when people speak about him like he’s not even there.

Naturally, Edelgard speaks for him. “Consulting another person would constitute an unfair advantage, would it not?”

“Come now, Edelgard, this is just a friendly game. No stakes. You can consult a whole team of experts if you feel the need.” Claude finally slouches, leaning back from the table, lazily suspending one of his gloved hands in the air in front of him. “I might have brought the professor to help me, if I really wanted to win. She gives pretty good advice.”

Edelgard doesn’t react, and Claude nearly smirks. He’s spent so long thinking of the professor as the person who saved his life that it’s been easy to forget she saved Edelgard’s life as well—literally throwing herself in front of an axe, and he’s had a hunch that Edelgard has been fascinated by the professor ever since. The Golden Deer victories in both mock battles have only hammered the point home. Countless people would jump at the chance to teach the imperial princess, as well as the crown prince, and yet the professor passed up both of them for Claude’s ragtag bunch, and no one, least of all her students, have quite been able to discern why.

That doesn’t mean Claude’s not going to hold it over her head forever.

“Very well,” she says stiffly. “Hubert, this pawn is an obvious trap. This rook, too, is an obvious trap. The bishop is an obvious trap. Are any of them worth taking?”

“The pawn,” says the retainer, and doesn’t explain why. His voice is unyielding, guttural. They all know his role: to hover behind his master, to threaten using his presence alone. In most situations, he’s the perfect accomplice to his liege, one of the main reasons why other students find her so distant and inapproachable, the spymaster to Edelgard’s role as diplomat—but huddled behind a board game, the two of them just look ridiculous.

Edelgard takes the pawn, and Claude pulls his bishop back to both threaten and protect, saying, “Check.” She furrows her brow, pulls her glove further down her wrist, then moves her king out of the way. Immediately, Claude responds by pulling his queen back to threaten three of her pieces at once. No breaks allowed. The only way she can remove his queen is by sacrificing her own.

“Claude, are you even thinking your moves through?”

“Nah, it’s more fun this way,” he lies. “This is how me and Lorenz bang out ten games at a time—just go with whatever seems like a good move. Don’t wanna overthink.” He waves his hands, gloved and sweating, in a show of exaggerated humbleness. “Oh, not that I’m rushing you, or anything! Take all the time in the world.”

“I wouldn’t want you to _under_ think either,” Edelgard says coyly, and makes the exact move he was hoping she wouldn’t. Triumphantly, she sits back and pulls her gloves further down her wrist again.

“Something wrong with your gloves?” Claude asks innocently.

“No,” Edelgard says, and for the first time, he can see her _really_ crack, just the slightest twinges of annoyance curving down her face. “You don’t usually wear gloves yourself.”

Claude shrugs flippantly, and begins shoring up his defenses. “Well, you’re wearing gloves, and _you’re_ wearing gloves...maybe I just didn’t wanna feel left out.”

It’s a flagrant mockery and all three of them know it and Hubert is glaring at him again, and Claude wonders if royal retainers are chosen based on facial expression or if their faces simply become that way over time. He’s never been so up close and personal with Hubert before. Even while sitting in a classroom in broad daylight, the older student still looks like he’s about to emerge from a dark alley and shank him.

A lapdog, towering behind their lord, ready to kill at their beck and call—that’s something she has that Claude doesn’t, and it’s a disadvantage, he acknowledges. Even the prince has one, and Claude nearly scoffs aloud just thinking about it again. The official story is that Dimitri personally saved Dedue’s life, as if they really expect anyone to believe that the prince himself just so happened to save a commoner, who just so happened to swear his life to him, while just so happening to grow into a musclebound mountain of a man with a face capable of frightening crying children into silence. Even the princess of Brigid can recite a more believable cover story. Probably, it was the first thing they had taught her how to say. As he ruminates, Edelgard is pressing her advantage, using the now-clear left side of the board to surround his pieces. He’s built a foxhole of sorts out of pawns and a bishop, and his king is backed in, increasingly running out of spaces to run. Their queens still stare at each other from across the board, fully aware that the death of the other will cause the death of both.

Edelgard strikes first.

With his queen gone and his defensive line crippled, the game is as good as over. Claude respectfully plays his part to the very last, his king hopping about alone until Edelgard knocks it down. “Well played,” he commends her, shaking her glove, and then extends his hand to Hubert as well. Hubert looks at it like he’d rather twist it off, but shakes obediently. Good dog.

A light smile graces Edelgard’s face. “Was this game everything you had hoped for?”

“Oh yeah. It was fun. I definitely learned a lot.”

She stares right through him, and for the first time, the knowing look in her eyes turns dangerous. “And what about your ulterior motive?”

“I didn’t have an ulterior motive,” he says, unsure if he’s even lying or not. “I just wanted to play someone good. No offense to Lorenz.”

She’s still looking at him, unbelieving, and he can’t resist one final jab. “Well, you know me,” he tells her, fully aware that she knows next to nothing about him. “I just can’t stay away from the allure—and you are oh-so-ever alluring, Edelgard. The game was fun, right?”

“I suppose. It was certainly an interesting way to spend an afternoon. If you’ll allow me to say so, you’re quite competent.”

The usual wink surfaces again. “Oh, I’ve been called worse things. ‘Competent’ will tide me over for now.”

The game is collected and tucked under an arm, and Claude departs. Normally, he would wander around a bit, maybe head to the library or cathedral before doubling back on himself, but that would be redundant in this case, since Hubert already knows where he lives.

On the way back to his room, he knocks a few times on Hilda’s door.

“Claude?” she says, genuinely surprised. “You’re still alive?”

“What, disappointed?” he teases. “It’s going to take more than the imperial princess to put me down. Thanks for letting me borrow the gloves.”

Hilda takes the pair of white gloves away, hopefully for incineration, and tosses them atop a pile of other dirty laundry, and Claude looks at her—he _really_ looks at her, in all her lazy, carefree, twintailed glory. Where he’s from, the name of Goneril is spoken with a grudging, well-earned respect.

“Hey, Hilda,” he ventures, “do you wanna be my retainer?”

Hysterical laughter echoes throughout the hallways, even after she slams the door in his face.

***

It’s gone. A piece is just gone.

Claude has never been to a Fódlan funeral. Sir Jeralt was a proud warrior in life, and no one is quite willing to acknowledge the manner of his death. Subterfuge, a knife in the back, and in full view of his _only child_ no less—that’s not a story that gets told _anywhere_. Teach cries. It doesn’t seem real. For so long, she was like a walking corpse herself, unable to do so much as smile, and it’s taken a visit from death to prove to everyone how alive she truly is.

Class is cancelled, and Claude uses the free time to find the students who accused Marianne of being the next Monica based on nothing more than her shyness. As he mixes capsaicin extract into their soup, he reflects that’s it’s unusual for him to be so protective. It’s just, times like these remind him to hold on to what he has. Outsiders, together, all of them. If he doesn’t look out for his Golden Deer, who will?

“Good to see you up and running again,” he says to the professor. Teach is shorter than him, he thinks, as if he’s realizing it for the first time. “You’re looking much better.”

Stoic, but not emotionless anymore; only strong. Wordlessly, she pushes the missing board game piece toward him, and for a second he’s legitimately speechless.

He takes the stone and flips it between his fingers. “I was wondering where this went.”

The professor turns away and walks off without preamble, in the way that she just does, but Claude steps forward for the last word. “Hey, if there’s anything you need, just let me know,” he tells her. “You...you’ve taken good care of us, teach. Always have. And I know we might have a funny way of showing it sometimes, but we really care about you, too.” His wink is halfhearted, more of a reflex than anything. “Watch out for yourself. Alright?”

She looks at him with those blank, unending eyes. “Thank you, Claude.”

Did she ever give him any reason to doubt?

**Author's Note:**

> The game that Claude plays is implied to be backgammon, and the board game that you can buy in the market is implied to be chess. But for reasons of convention, the games are never actually named. They could be playing snakes and ladders for all we know.


End file.
